Back to the past: it’s safer there. There is a themed restaurant dedicated to George VI of all people, near Berkeley Square – a sort of Rainforest Café for monarchists who won’t sink to the Tiltyard Café at Hampton Court. I was looking for a restaurant my husband might like – Brexit, meat, maps of the Empire at its height in colour – and I found the Guinea Grill in Bruton Place. George VI isn’t a vivid monarch. He lived in the shadow of queens – one Mary, two Elizabeths – and on film he is always crying, or dying. In The Crown (Jared Harris, marvellous) he lost his lung. In The King’s Speech (Colin Firth, good, but handsome) he lost his happiness. I like to think George was tougher and less pitiable than the chronicles suggest. A themed restaurant is a start, and a good thing always: it believes in something.
There are two halves: the Young’s pub, which is all bustle and hot, male breath, and the restaurant, which is something out of a Spectator reader’s dreams
The shadow of queens is long. The Guinea Grill is George VI-themed, it is true, but it sits in Bruton Place because his famous daughter was born at 17 Bruton Street, the home of the parents of his famous wife. (The Queen Mother – ‘the steel marshmallow’ – loved Mayfair. When exiled to White Lodge in Richmond after her marriage, she sulked until George facilitated her return.) You can see the spot. The house is demolished but Elizabeth II’s birthplace is marked by a plaque on an office block near the Bentley showroom. George got the mews for his tribute restaurant and, if it feels typical, it also works. I can’t imagine his themed restaurant in marble.
Bruton Place is a mews in denial of its status: it’s the class system in bricks. It’s trying to be fashionable – security guards lurk; you might as well guard a bin – but that is one of the things I love about London: its hope. The Grill is part of a pub called the Guinea, established in 1675, though there has been an inn on this site since 1423, when topics of conversation might have included – from a swift Google – the Hundred Years War, the minority of Henry VI and the earliest-known woodcut print. Never forget, dear reader: we stand on the shoulders of the always slightly drunk. It is a pair of tall Victorian houses, one white paint for purity, one brown brick for blood. There is a bow window on the first floor saying ‘restaurant’ in neon, and stone rams in lights. Are they George? I read that the Hanoverians are lusty. (I refuse to call them Windsors in my current mood. I am tired of spin.) The Grill opened in 1952, the year George died, so it’s restaurant as gravestone. It doesn’t feel like it.
Inside there are two halves: the Young’s pub, which is all bustle and hot, male breath, and the restaurant, which is something out of a Spectator reader’s dreams. That is why I saved it for Christmas: the happy spot between the onslaught of state-assisted suicide and January. Pah! Remember the giant’s house in Mr Greedy? The sausage the size of a boat? The peas? If I close my eyes I can smell, and touch, that fictional sausage, and the Grill is that restaurant for adults. It is, for a certain kind of person such as you and me, perfection, because it is time travel. Maybe it is our national predicament in meat and sauce. I don’t care.
The windows are curtained with red, like childhood fiction. Inside is a warren of many rooms, including a grill filled with grass-fed, dry-aged meat from Godfreys of Finsbury Park. This aside, they are wood–panelled, with tartan carpets and candelabra with hats. Guinea Grill is written in curling letters on a glass partition. There is a shabby set of Charles Dickens novels and a painting of the first Duke of Wellington. The tables are sturdy and white-clothed. The chairs are for fat people. Upstairs I find the empty private dining room, haunted and darkened, the table covered with plates of British cheese for ghosts. It is, essentially, Rules restaurant with less gilding, and that’s fine.
It is a truism that the current wealth aesthetic crawls over London like grey fog: try the Peninsula hotel. (I mean, rather, don’t.) This resists it, and it soothes people who hate this century and want an ideal of the last one. There are paintings of Winston Churchill – perhaps he was a candidate for theme, though he has the Churchill Arms in Kensington, an excitable Thai pub – and also of George VI. There is young George, soft, perplexed; George on his wedding day, gazing at Elizabeth who gazes at us so we can gaze at her in turn; George staring at the camera, sword in hand. He couldn’t use it: he was banned from attending the D-Day landings by Churchill. I imagine the portraits tutting at each other. Bruton Place is as good a place to think about him as any, and perhaps Elizabeth II thought so too. She dined at Bellamy’s, a few doors down the mews, on her 80th birthday. It made the papers.
The menu is a treasure house, and vast. The online menu has a vegan filter on it, but it’s a taunt. Press the button and there’s nothing. I have space for highlights: oak-smoked salmon with caperberries (£18); devilled kidneys on toast (£15.50); French onion soup (£10). There are pies – beef, Guinness and oyster (£35), steak and mushroom (£25), potato and Wensleydale (£25) – beef Wellington, and a jigsaw of cows. I have sirloin on the bone – always the sweetest cut, for me – with gratin potatoes, thin, rich, baked in fat. My husband has a mixed grill, like his life. This is steak, nubby sausages, mushroom, thick bacon, fried eggs, and lamb cutlet on the side: a swollen English breakfast. You can order an ox heart, pig in blanket or haggis (all £7). Sauce is brandy peppercorn, blue cheese, garlic butter, red wine jus or Bearnaise. Pudding is crème brûlée (£10) and chocolate mousse (£9).
Writing about food is like writing about sex: when glorious, neither lend themselves to words. We both know it. What does a dopamine rush from beyond have to do with a cauliflower cheese anyway? But I can say, dully, that it is perfectly cooked, and ample, kindly brought and, if not for the cow, happy. I don’t know if it would be to George’s taste: he looks spare to me, but if you want late Imperial London on a plate, this is it. We would have danced through Mayfair if we could. Merry Christmas, reader. It is here.
The Guinea Grill, 30 Bruton Place, London W1J 6NL; theguinea.co.uk; tel: 020 7409 1728.
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